'Chiptune' Bands Blitz New York for Blip Festival

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'Chiptune' Bands Blitz New York for Blip Festival

Chiptune artists at the Blip Festival perform in front of a low-bit video screen. *Photo: Courtesy blipfestival.org * Videogame soundtracks may be on par with Hollywood film soundtracks these days, but the audio upgrade hasn't tempered the enthusiasm of "chiptune" artists who hack, tweak and repurpose old computers and videogame systems to make music of a surprising sonic variety.

Chiptune artists and fans from around the world will unite at New York's second Blip Festival starting Nov. 29 to steep their ears in the lo-fi bloops and bleeps that define the chiptune, or "8-bit," sound. Festival organizers predict a successful follow-up to 2006's event.

"I was there every day last year, and it was great. This whole 8-bit scene is very community-based," said New York electronic musician Haeyoung Kim, aka bubblyfish, who played at last year's event and is scheduled to perform at 8 p.m. Friday. "It's not about me showing off my music and being heard, it's about being there, listening to someone else and feeling the energy together and dancing around."

Having germinated in the hacker stronghold of 1980s Scandinavia, chiptune music has become a worldwide scene with no clear geographical center. Perhaps the ultimate musical form for hackers, the international chiptune scene spawned directly from the cracking of copyright protection. A subgenre grew out of the crackers' work, evolving and expanding to encompass a wide variety of musical styles: Rave, rock, shoegaze, techno and heavy-metal traditions will all be in evidence at this year's four-day festival.

"When the game industry started to make music, and when people cracked games so that you could copy them, they removed the copy protection from the diskette or tape," said Dragan Espenschied of Bodenständig 2000, a popular German chiptune band whose festival performance is scheduled for midnight Saturday. "And then they started to make their own music on the quality level of game music, because they had to analyze how this music was made when they'd go through the code to crack the game. Then it really started to explode."

For participants in the chiptune scene, its allure combines a love for the sound of classic hardware with an emphasis on transparency – knowing how sounds are made, and how to hack them into original compositions.

"If you have a game or music somebody else made and you listen to it, you instantly know you can do the same thing," said Espenschied, whose band is known for its electrifying live shows. "There is no secrecy about it, or elitism. It's not about having the latest Pro Tools or whatever. This is what made me first go into this chip music: the do-it-yourself thing."

Most chiptune artists share that DIY sentiment and use a similar set of hardware – Commodore 64s, Game Boys, Atari 2600s and others of similar ilk – to make their music. Still, music within the chiptune scene varies to an unexpected degree.

Regardless of their musical predilections, most of the 40 or so artists scheduled to perform at the Blip Festival will do so in front of a screen showing low-bit videos.

"I think the music stands on its own as a recording," said Paul Slocum of Dallas-based Tree Wave, whose hacked dot-matrix printer functions as a rhythm section. "But as far as a live performance ... the video component kind of makes up for not being a rock star."